Introduction

A haunting, contemporary love story from the New York Times bestselling author of Conversion


It’s July in New York City, and aspiring filmmaker Wes Auckerman has just arrived to start his summer term at NYU. While shooting a séance at a psychic’s in the East Village, he meets a mysterious, intoxicatingly beautiful girl named Annie.

As they start spending time together, Wes finds himself falling for her, drawn to her rose-petal lips and her entrancing glow. There’s just something about her that he can’t put his finger on, something faraway and otherworldly that compels him to fall even deeper. Annie’s from the city, and yet she seems just as out of place as Wes feels. Lost in the chaos of the busy city streets, she’s been searching for something—a missing ring. And now Annie is running out of time and needs Wes’s help. As they search together, Annie and Wes uncover secrets lurking around every corner, secrets that will reveal the truth of Annie’s dark past.

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Excerpt

The morning light is streaming into the first floor hallway, pouring like rays of heaven through the transom window over the front door, glinting off the hallstand mirror. I squint against it, and descend another step. Usually the morning light is soft, orange and muted, since more buildings have gone up on this block. But today the light is harsh and white.

I bring my hand up to shade my eyes, peering into the glare.

The whiteness is so bright it’s almost a haze, or a cloud. It fills the hall, lightening the dove-gray walls and swallowing the floorboards into invisibility.

I descend another couple of steps, and the light glows so bright that I can’t see where I’m stepping. My feet hunt about for each stair tread, and I grope for the bannister to steady myself, but I can’t find it. My hand plunges into space, grasping nothing.

Finally my foot lands hard on the floor, and the carpet runner is missing, and my foot makes an unfamiliar sound in the front hallway. Voices are all around me. Their murmurs rise and fall, like music, or like the crowds of people outside the African Grove Theater on Bleeker, a clamor of voices and sounds and smells and everyone talking at once, but somehow never to each other. I can’t make any of them out, and none of them seem to be talking to me, but they buzz around to my ears like bees, close enough that I struggle to bat them away.

“Papa?” I call out.

The brightness of the morning sun is making my eyes ache.

“Order up!” someone shouts close to my ear, making me jump from surprise.

“What?” I say, looking left and right.

I can’t see anyone. I’m alone, but somehow I’m surrounded by people and smells and I can hear a bell jangling, but I can’t tell if it’s the bell Mother uses to summon us for meals or if it’s something different.

“Mother?” I try this time, wondering if she’s serving breakfast in the drawing room for some reason. Perhaps she has guests? But she wouldn’t entertain at breakfast. And she would have made sure Beattie and I dressed up.

A whiff of air brushes past my cheeks, and I spin where I’m standing, but all I see is the vaguest outline of the front hallway filled with pure white light.

I move nearer to the drawing room, reaching a hand forward to where the sliding door should be, but my hand keeps going forward in space, deeper into a void, not meeting anything.

“Keep it moving, keep it moving! Whatchou want, huh?” someone barks on my left.

My eyes wide with terror, I spin again, hunting for the speaker.

“Who said that?” I raise my voice. “I can hear you!”

Nobody answers me, but still I hear the voices, talking amongst themselves, little snippets of conversation that I can almost understand, but not quite.

Another whiff of air brushes past my other cheek, and I close my eyes, feeling whatever it is pass through me as though it were a summer breeze.

“What is this?” I ask myself. “What is this?”

When I open my eyes again, I’m standing in the middle of the drawing room, but it’s not the drawing room. It’s overlit with glaring white lights that hum overhead. Most confusingly of all, it’s packed to the gills with total strangers.

They’re gathered around small tables I’ve never seen before. All Mother’s carefully chosen fixtures are gone, the horsehair sofas and the occasional chairs and the hulking marble mantelpiece with the gilt-framed mirror. Or rather, there’s a mirror where the gilt-framed one used to be, but it’s spotted and chipped, and someone has written on it, what looks like a long list, with words that don’t make any sense to me. Like Latin, but not Latin.

Calzone. Pepperoni. Mortadella.

The gas chandelier is gone, and instead it’s as though the whole ceiling is lit from within by white light that flickers, but not the way a candle flickers. The smell of food is mouthwatering.

But who are all these people?

I stare at them, and none of them pay any attention to me. They’re all different ages, dressed in the most bizarre way. Some of them look like they aren’t even dressed at all. Girls in black camisoles lean over tables, their bodies loose, their hair flowing down their backs. They’re with boys, most of them, and they’re all eating with their hands. It’s like a savory kind of pie, only without a crust. Like a half-pie, half quiche. They all act like it’s completely normal that they’re there, eating breakfast in my mother’s drawing room.

Panicking, I grip my skirts in my fists.

Where did these people come from? Who said they could be in our house?

“Who ARE YOU?” I scream.

Nobody answers me!

“Tell me who you ARE!” I bellow, rushing up to one of the tables.

There’s a girl sitting there, one of the ones who’s left the house in her nightdress as far as I can tell, and she’s bending forward and laughing, and I can see all the way down her bodice. She’s completely unlaced, and if Mother knew this prostitute was in her drawing room, I don’t know what she’d do. She’d call Papa, and she’d call Winston, and if they didn’t come she’d beat the girl senseless with a fireplace poker herself.

“You can’t be here!” I shout in her ear.

The girl just keeps laughing and talking, chewing with her mouth open.

I put my hands on the table between them, leaning into their conversation. The boy is just as bad. He reeks like a French waterfront whore, and his hair is so short it looks like he’s been lately shaved for lice. Neither of them takes the slightest notice of me.

“Get out of my HOUSE!” I scream at the top of my lungs, and I take hold of the table where they’re sitting, grab it with both my hands and make ready to hurl it away, crashing it across the room in a righteous fury.

“Annatje?” someone says softly.

I look up, my eyes crazed with violence.

Mother is standing by the sliding door of the drawing room, her hand resting on the burled walnut that she chose for the wainscoting. She is giving me a curious look.

Panting, I look down at my hands, and find that they are resting on the card table that Mother left out from Papa’s whist game last week. No one has been in the drawing room since then. There’s a round stain where one of the Corporation men left his sherry glass without a coaster. It looks dried and gray in the morning light.

“Is everything all right?” she asks me lightly.

I release the edge of the card table and smooth my hands down the front of my day dress.

“Of course, Mother,” I say with some difficulty.

“I thought I hard you shout, just now.”

I level my eyes at my mother’s face and smile prettily at her.

“Shout?” I echo, as mildly as I can.

“Yes. I thought I heard you raise your voice, a moment ago.”

It’s not like Mother to press the issue. Usually we maintain a tacit agreement that we will each pretend I do what I’m supposed to do, virtually all of the time. It’s easier on both of us.

“I’m so sorry, Mother,” I say. “Perhaps you heard someone out in the street? A peddler? They’re getting louder and louder, aren’t they?”

She watches me for a long moment.

“Indeed they are,” she says after a time. “Jews,” she adds under her breath.

We stare at each other across the length of the drawing room, each wondering who is going to call me on my bluff.

At length she says “Well. Beatrice is down. We’re about to eat.”

“All right,” I say.

She’s on the point of leaving, when she gives me a last long look and says “Are you quite sure you’re all right, Annie?”

Her unaccustomed use of my preferred name takes me aback, and I have to steady myself on the card table.

“I… I think so,” I say.

What I want to do is run to her, and have her hold me and tell me that I’m just having a bad dream within a bad dream. I want her to tell me that it’s probably on account of my having too much Madeira, which I shouldn’t have accepted from Mrs. Dudley at the Corporation dinner, and it serves me right for indulging too much, and it’s just this sort of thing that’s made her consider joining the Temperance Society, except that Papa wouldn’t allow it until after the Canal were open, for political reasons. I want to tell her that my cameo’s missing, and beg her to help me find it, and I want to tell her that it was Herschel who gave it to me, and why.

“I think… perhaps, there’s something the matter with my head.” I finish.

I bring my hand to my temple.

“The Madeira,” my mother sniffs, and in a way, her assumption fills me with relief, as it is exactly what Mother would say, if we were really having this conversation. “It serves you right, I think. In any case, there’s coffee on the breakfast table.”

She whisks away down the hall, and I can hear the rustling of her skirts as she goes.

I lean myself ever so slightly to the left, so that I can see further down the hall, and confirm that she’s really gone.

And then I grab up my skirts and run for the front door. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

A) THE APPEARANCE OF ANNIE VAN SINDEREN has a lot to say about image, representation, and memory, both for individuals and for haunted spaces. Have you ever been to New York City? Did you already have an imaginary image of what it would be like? How was the reality of the lived experience different from the imagined version? Was any of it the same?

B) Wes and Annie develop feelings for each other even though their relationship is impossible, divided as they are by relations with other people, by time, by space, and by experience. Have you ever experienced impossible love? Is it worth it, even when you know it can never work?

C) Have you ever seen a ghost?

D) How did you know?

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